I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

132 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
sign papers separating us from the government. I was determined to leave government
employment PERIOD, and asked to have all my retirement money refunded. I shook my
girlfriend’s hand, and vowed never to work for the government again.
Back in the States, I worked for a time in the export division of a drug company in
Philadelphia. When one of the men left the firm to open his own export-import business
in Mexico, he asked me to manage the office. But his plans didn’t work out. So I went back
home to Maryland and again began looking for a job.
As I said, I had had my fill of books in college. But I continued to study when I had a
particular reason. I had learned shorthand and typing to help find a job during the Depression.
I had taken private lessons in Spanish and German in anticipation of traveling to South
America and Europe. But for several years, I had done no serious reading—only an occasional
mystery, detective story, or novel, no non-fiction, and few if any newspapers. I decided I didn’t
like myself. I felt the need for mental stimulation and set out to become more intellectual. I
joined the Book of the Month Club and started reading books. I joined the Foreign Policy
Association and read their publications. When the opportunity to go to Mexico and use my
Spanish fell through, I answered an ad in the Washington Star for an editorial assistant. That
sounded more challenging than ordinary secretarial work. In replying to the ad, I described
my schooling and work experience in and out of government and closed by saying that “I was
fed up with government bureaucracy.” I was called in for an interview.
The ad had been placed in the paper by Percy L. Greaves, Jr., then Executive Director
of the newly organized, tax-exempt Foundation for Freedom. As I recall the interview, it
was lively and stimulating. After talking for a while, he said he was still interviewing and
would get back to me. He did. He offered me a job and I began work the following week
in the Foundation for Freedom’s under-funded, sparsely furnished, one-man, one-girl office.
That was when my economic education began.
Percy set me to work organizing his files. He said I would begin to understand what he
wanted as I looked through his newspaper clippings and read the papers he marked every day
for me to clip. I began by making folders for the clippings and arranging them under large
subject areas: government, business, international relations, etc. When I told him I would put
“housing” under “business,” he said that was where it should be, but not where it then belonged.
I soon learned that his interest in “housing” was not in the private business of building houses,
but in public housing and how government interfered and regulated the business.
I knew nothing at all about money and banking. However, I had learned from my
father that inflation was due to government’s printing paper money. Percy explained that,
under Roosevelt’s New Deal, the U.S. government didn’t have to print paper money directly;
it had been given the authority to create new money by printing government bonds (government
promises-to-pay). In other words, the government didn’t operate a dollar printing
press directly, but it operated a bond printing press. The government could print paper
IOUs (bonds) that could be converted into dollars through the Federal Reserve. For instance,
if the government printed a million-dollar bond and gave it to the Fed, the Fed would open
a million-dollar checking account in the name of the government. Then the government
could write checks on this account to buy guns, pay government employees, soldiers, postmasters,
social security retirees, etc. When the recipients cashed their checks, the Fed give